Guest Editors’ Introduction: Human Resource Management in Health Care and Elderly Care: Current Challenges and Toward a Research Agenda

Given the universal pressures within the health and elderly care sectors for cost reduction and the need for high‐quality care, the effective management of the workforce in care organizations is of critical importance. In this article, we examine the changing landscape of the health care and aged care systems and identify key challenges for the human resource management ( HRM ) field. We assess existing research evidence on the role of HRM and high‐performance work systems in the health care sector. We also outline a number of research areas as fruitful avenues for future studies, drawing particular attention to aged care as an underresearched subsector, and immigrants as an important group of research targets. The key message of our article is that future research on HRM in the care sector has much to gain by adopting an interdisciplinary, multilevel, and multistakeholder approach. More cross‐sectoral and cross‐country comparative studies of HRM in health care and other care work are also needed to shed light on how policy orientations, institutional arrangements, social norms, and cultural traditions influence care regimes across different societies, and to encourage the sharing of learning across societies. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.